Brief Background
Farm- and field-level management practices and technologies represent a core component of climate-smart agriculture (CSA) interventions. Regional and national policies are constructed around them, investments are structured to catalyze adoption of them and climate-smart services create products based on them. Their centrality to creating a climate-smart future make it imperative that program developers and implementers have the best information available on the effect of practices on productivity, resilience and emissions (i.e., their climate-smartness) to design efficient and effective CSA policies, programs and products. Until now, however, little empirical evidence has been put forth to systematically support which management practices and technologies are or are not CSA.
This session will launch the beta-Evidence for Resilient Agriculture (ERA), previously called The CSA Compendium. ERA is a novel big-data platform built around the largest agricultural meta-analysis to date. ERA contains more than 75,000 data points from about 1,400 scientific studies conducted in Africa that describe the impacts of more than 100 agricultural technologies on more than 50 indicators of productivity and resilience (e.g., net returns, yield stability, soil carbon, resource use efficiency). This core combines with a rich dataverse of climate, soil, and social information (e.g., distance to market) to produce an unparalleled resource to support science-based decision-making and the identification of locally adapted but scalable options.
Session Objectives
This session aims to introduce ERA’s current functionality and tools under development to participants. We hope the session produces new ideas and partnerships to use the data in decision making and science.
